Flat Earth News

Publisher's Summary

When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious "Sunday" newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the effect of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq - tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts - a profession corrupted at the core.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful

You'll never buy a newspaper again

On the whole this is a well written, well paced look at the systems, companies and publications that provide the news to an eager public. The examples the author uses to back up his opinions are both alarming and entertaining, although there is a certain degree of teary eyed "back in the day" sentimentality about certain aspects. And this is really the downside of the book, with the author believing that the way to fix the news is to throw more reporters, and more money, at it. His stories of The Daily Mail serve as ample proof that this isn't necessarily the answer, and in that regard he comes across as somewhat naive.

Having said that, the book is a thoroughly entertaining listen, and is excellently narrated. I could quite comfortably listen at double speed. It really will, reservations aside for a moment, make you look at the news in a new light. The author's take on well covered subjects, for example the heroin trade, is eye opening. I only wish I had the time and inclination to follow up the author's claims in the same way he suggests reporters do because I'd hate the author to be guilty of the acts he accuses others of.